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Title: WormSpace: A Modular Foundation for Simple, Verifiable Distributed Systems
We propose the Write-Once Register (WOR) as an abstraction for building and verifying distributed systems. A WOR exposes a simple, data-centric API: clients can capture, write, and read it. Applications can use a sequence or a set of WORs to obtain properties such as durability, concurrency control, and failure atomicity. By hiding the logic for distributed coordination underneath a data-centric API, the WOR abstraction enables easy, incremental, and extensible implementation and verification of applications built above it. We present the design, implementation, and verification of a system called WormSpace that provides developers with an address space of WORs, implementing each WOR via a Paxos instance. We describe three applications built over WormSpace: a flexible, efficient Multi-Paxos implementation; a shared log implementation with lower append latency than the state-of-the-art; and a fault-tolerant transaction coordinator that uses an optimal number of round-trips. We show that these applications are simple, easy to verify, and match the performance of unverified monolithic implementations. We use a modular layered verification approach to link the proofs for WormSpace, its applications, and a verified operating system to produce the first verified distributed system stack from the application to the operating system.
Authors:
; ; ; ; ; ;
Award ID(s):
1637385 1763399 1521523 1715154
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10130741
Journal Name:
SoCC'19: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
299 to 311
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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